For Hilary Linstead, a starring role at last

Elisabeth Davies, left, and Hilary Linstead take the reader through Turkey, South Africa, Morocco, South America and many of the other places the friends visited over 16 years of travelling together.
Photo: Dean Sewell

There’s a moment in Growing Old Outrageously when agent-to-the-stars-turned-writer Hilary Linstead goes to Art Basel with her travel companion and co-writer Elisabeth Davies. The art is more Davies’ thing than Linstead’s, so the latter is delighted to discover that a young filmmaker she’d known 25 years earlier was launching a book there.

That filmmaker was
Tracey Moffatt
, one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists, now based in New York.

“To my surprise Tracey recognised me in the audience. She waved and called out, ‘What are you doing here?’, and without waiting for an answer pointed to me and shouted out for all to hear, ‘She’s a famous agent – a legend in her lifetime!’,’’ Linstead writes. “I was mortified, very aware of my ill-assembled bloomer pants, double-extra T-shirt and navy blue Crocs."

Davies and Linstead would no doubt have laughed themselves silly at the thought of the snooty Art Basel types looking at this dowdily dressed Australian and trying to envisage her as a famous artist’s agent. Linstead and Davies do a lot of laughing in this book, which takes the reader on a ride through Turkey, South Africa, Morocco, South America and many of the other places the friends visited over 16 years of travelling together.

Despite numerous rows while on the road, the pair always found something to laugh about.
AFR

Moffatt was not wrong. Before retiring in 2009, Linstead was one of Australia’s most respected artistic and casting agents representing, at various stages in their careers, writers
Peter Carey
, Andrew Bovell and Nick Enright, comedians
Wendy Harmer
,
Magda Szubanski
and
Jean Kittson
, filmmakers
Gillian Armstrong
and
Jane Campion
, theatre directors
Neil Armfield
and
Richard Wherrett
, and for the first 15 years of their careers, the duo
Baz Luhrmann
and
Catherine Martin
.

“I was the first agent he ever had as a director. He also had an American agent, and after about 15 years I said, ‘you don’t need me’,’’ Linstead recalls. “It was after Romeo + Juliet, I said, ‘I think I’ll just slip into the background now’. We both beamed at each other and that was that."

The British-born Linstead began her career in theatre as an actor before moving quickly into casting, first with Lintas Advertising then in her own business with Liz Mullinar, M&L Casting Consultants, with Linstead handling most of the theatre and film work. A lot of casting, she says, is intuition.

“That’s the way the best casting is done. A really good actor brings something of themselves to everything they do. An energy walks into the room. Or a neurosis walks into the room, a sort of edge. Or a mystery. Or a sadness," she says. “Now, that’s what people like, that’s what makes people excited."

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Linstead was appalled to find that cattle calls were the norm when she began working in the field. “People were just rude. They expected actors to basically do whatever they were told. You’d get an actor in for a commercial, and very well-known members of the profession would be standing waiting in lines,’’ she says. “When I started I said I will not do that, I will not get one actor in at the same time as another. They will each have an appointment."

She eventually also expanded into producing, developing with Phillip Noyce the 1982 film Heatwave, then in the mid- to late-1990s Tap Dogs, Dein Perry’s Newcastle-born, high testosterone live show which went on to become a worldwide hit.

It took eight years for Linstead’s talent agency to become profitable, and after selling it in the mid-2000s she stayed on as an employee for many years. Most of those she dealt with didn’t know that she’d sold out; the relationship between agent and client is typically intense, and talent rarely want a substitute hand-holder.

“It’s like a mother, but different. It wasn’t all altruism, either. My attachment to them was also very great, so weaning myself off them and handing them over to somebody else was extremely hard."

Putting herself on the other side of the table, becoming the “talent" through her own writing, was not easy for Linstead, but something that, with hindsight, was inevitable.

“I’d spent all my life criticising or guiding other people’s work, and I thought it was about time I had a go myself," Linstead says. “It’s the same reason I started producing films. You have to stand up and be counted."

Not surprisingly, despite listing empathy as one of the main tools of her trade, she says she has a lot more of it now. “I understand the agony of being a writer miles more now,’’ she says. “I now realise that I didn’t really understand it before. I could kind of empathise, I could tell when they got distressed, but now . . ."

The book took four years to write, with the two travelling companions trying numerous ways to make the stories they knew were very funny in the telling, actually sing on the page. Davies is UK-based and Linstead lives in Sydney, so much of the toing and froing was done via email. Davies had the benefit of having written more than 100 articles for a Karachi newspaper.

“After our pitch was accepted, Liz went off and wrote immediately, she wrote a version of the book, basically. And I did nothing," says Linstead with a giggle. At one stage they were going to do alternating chapters, but that didn’t work.

“Liz sent her chapters to me and I knew instantly that her style and my style were completely different. So I froze, completely. I didn’t write anything for pretty well a year. Then I thought, ‘oh come on, this is stupid’."

In the end they decided that the story had to have a narrator, and that the narrator had to be Linstead.

“Liz was very much facts and history. She would probably ideally have written a scholarly book, because she could, and I couldn’t,’’ Linstead says. “My style is more racy and accessible, and in a sense that’s because I’m an agent, and I knew what Allen & Unwin wanted. They wanted to know about Liz and me, our characters. They didn’t want yet another travel book, and neither did I. I wanted it to be about us, our friendship, what happened."

As anyone who has done it knows, travelling with a close friend is not all blissful. There are arguments, meetings with fellow travellers who one likes and the other can’t stand, disagreements over where to stay, eat, visit. None of this is glossed over in Growing Old Outrageously.

“We’re intense in our criticism of each other. How difficult was it? Difficult,’’ says Linstead. “She would say I slept all the time and she went off to see museums. But we would come back together and that would be fine. Our sense of humour is shared, we’re both English, so we’d always end up laughing at the madness of people, and the dreadful things that happen."

A lot has changed in the Australian arts and entertainment sector since Linstead’s heyday, but perhaps the biggest change has been the success of Australian actors and other theatre and film workers offshore.

Linstead fought many battles in the early years, including ensuring that if an Australian show toured offshore the director and designers would go with it, rather than being replaced by international ones. She also fought to ensure that local creative talent would be engaged for imported franchises.

“Harry Miller was instrumental in that. It was he who did Rocky Horror Show here, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and it was me who persuaded him to take Brian Thomson’s set design to England. I’m really proud of that achievement because it kept Brian in London. He got the first royalty an Australian designer ever got, and it kept him there, paid his rent, for years."

As for the huge salaries that top entertainers command on the international stage these days – which their agents no doubt fight for – Linstead finds them as distasteful as those paid to corporate CEOs.

“My view on those kind of salaries is that all salaries at that level are obscene, but it’s such a tiny little percentage, where actors are concerned." Ever the agent, she adds that it’s not the case here.

“An actor here wouldn’t get anything like what he would get overseas. But his presence in a film has made that film go . . . so that to some extent justifies the salary."